Would be a good application of a Grub menu option:

a) Boot with all bells & whistles. Or b) Boot straight into editor & type away.

Hell you could even use a customized kernel for that, to strip out all the boot-time consuming features that editor doesn't need.

Yes however I don't think you would have the network in that case[1], which might be handy to automatise backups.

[1] unless you start it from emacs which is also totally possible

you'll be distracted by your eternally changing .emacs configuration file :-)